Thursday January 17, 2008, 1:14 PM

...In which we discuss, among other things, theatre collaboration, the emerging non-profit model of the independent theatre, the emergence of the boutique chain theatre, the emergence of Juno as 2007's favorite example of indie / mainstream crossover, and -- as Greg and I discussed earlier at the office this week -- our growing sense of entitlement for available parking.

I know the Senator Theatre in Baltimore seems to put some effort into promoting other independent theatres in Baltimore - there's an ad for the Charles on its website. Is that something that's common with other areas among independent theatres, or are they still largely in competition with each other?

It's not so much that they're in competition with each other. One thing that's really kind of interesting is that Western Massachusetts is actually quite lucky in the fact that they have a number of independent theatres and movie houses. In many areas, when you go to them, when I meet a lot of people, I say, 'Where do you go to the movies?' And they say, 'I go to the Edwards 21;' 'I go to the Regal 16.' There's no choices like, 'Oh, I'm gonna go to the 1890's Opera House,' or 'I'm gonna go to this funky 1970's movie theatre' - most people don't have those kinds of options. So it's only in an area like Western Mass where you could actually see that there would be some, potentially, some competition between the Tower Theater in South Hadley and the Amherst Cinema.

Most of the time, it's gonna be a competition between the big multiplex and the one-to-two-or-three-screen independent theatre. In those cases, it's not so much that the independent theatres are in competition with each other - they're just trying to get their business to, you know, [fuction]. Yeah, I wish, I mean - there were, actually, in the 1970's, and in even way before then, and for decades, there were actually organizations that were affiliated basically, that were independent theatre organizations. They were trade organizations that were set up that were for the promotion of independent theatres, that worked together to fight against the larger circuits, to really try to make their voices heard, and to have the kind of clout within the industry. [...]

It would be quite important for independent theatres to work together and figure out how to make their situations easier. There are drive-in organizations that have done that - because there are only less than five hundred drive-ins left in the country. So they typically do have some ...affiliation where they do talk to one another. But there are also reasons why theatres can't necessarily cling to one another ... So I think, what Tom is doing, and Tom is not the only one is they're trying to promote an affinity a kind audience awareness of the importance of going to classic theatres and supporting independent mom and pop businesses, and having people understand that these are engines of economic progress and development in any town.

When you open a theatre, and people go to see movies, you're supplying businesses with parking that go into tax revenue, you're supplying feet on the street to support coffee shops and restaurants that take advantage of that business; bookstores that are nearby - people will browse in them while they're waiting to go to a movie. It just makes any downtown much more of a destination - and there are examples of that all over the country.

But it's something that most people just don't think is important so they'd rather put in a drug store or a parking lot [without] recognizing that even a reasonably profitable community theatre in a downtown area has a certain amount of attraction and destination that's really vital. And in neighborhoods that are deciding whether or not to preserve a theatre with public money or tax money, people really have to decide whether or not downtown to be a destination or whether they're happy to have it go by the wayside while the outside strip malls or shopping malls do all that business.

A lot of those movie theatres, especially the older ones, they seem to, as you mentioned earlier, usually they have prime downtown locations. And, if you get rid of them, that kind of sets a dangerous precedent -

It sets two precedents. One, you're not only losing that business, but it's also saying that you can't support entertainment. It's saying that the downtown cannot support a viable entertainment. And that's not good for getting businesses to open up downtown. You really want to support these local businesses. And, again, the Pioneer Valley is the absolute exception to this because those towns are towns that traditionally are very anti-chain store and tend to promote mom-and-pop businesses. So, it's not the idea that - there are certainly strip malls in the Northampton area. But really, the focus, if you're gonna go shopping in Northampton, its kind of nice in that way for people to choose to go downtown. But ask Holyoke - it sure would be nice to have a couple of theatres that run downtown. Of course, no one goes to downtown Holyoke for the movies.

You mentioned last week that the non-profit conversion model - for lack of a better term - for art house theatres, is only about 10-15 years old, at least in small towns. Do you think that type of model could have been implemented successfully earlier or did it really need the non-profit surge in the 90's to take off nationwide?

Well, let me amend that a little bit. It's not that theatres have not been non-profit organizations running theatres since the 1970's because there have. And a number of the more successful ventures which tried to take, say, a 2-to-4 / 5 thousand-seat theatre and reopen them were done using the non-profit structure. But we were more specifically talking about the second-run theatres and even porn theatres and other art house theatres which have recognized that going to this kind of membership-based non-profit model - or something akin to a museum or archive or some other venue like that - that model has really, yeah, over the last 15-20 years, that's been a growing and successful model, probably because of the unpredictability of the box office, and also because, again, you can get tremendous tax breaks. You can get great public and private support, corporate support. There's a lot of money in naming rights, for the theatre or for a certain wing of the theatre. There's all kinds of opportunities open for you if you're a non-profit. It just didn't occur to many people to do that.

And also, there are many communities - and again, Western Massachusetts is the exception - but there are many communities around the country that said 'I'm not gonna show an art house film; nobody around here wants to go see some European film, or some film from Hong Kong.' And then, of course, once they had trouble booking anything because it was all going to the multiplexes and they recognized the [diminishing] second-run market - as I mentioned, the window between theatrical release and home video is so small now; in some cases, you can see a movie on a plane before you can see it in a second-run theatre. People said, 'You know, maybe I'll try this other movie.'

And, of course, what we consider art-house these days, you know - two movies are perfect to look at. Amadeus, and Chariots of Fire. Those movies were released by Warner Bros. - today, they'd probably be released by Fox Searchlight, Miramax, or any number of these more independent studios - or the more art-house brand of these traditional studios. So, that's changed a little bit too, so that art-house has become a bit more mainstream, number one, and, then, number two, it's that people are looking for something that's reliable. And I think that art-house has become reliable because buying a film, like No Country for Old Men, or There Will Be Blood, it will play in an art house, but it has a kind of crossover appeal. ...

But even those films, they aren't necessarily something that people thought that they wanted to play in a nice quaint little town that was not used to that. You know, they're 50 miles away from a university, they don't have a film society, there's no real cinephile culture in the town - there's a nice video store, and whenever they can play the new Indiana Jones movie, they will. And all the sudden the new multiplex opens up in town and they can't get a good film and they suddenly decide to play these smaller more quote-unquote 'adult' [Ed: or, films that cater to a more mature, sophisticated audience] films. And all of a sudden they notice that people who don't generally want to go to multiplexes, like people who are over the age of 40, or especially 50, who really want to go to a single-screen theatre and have a quiet experience away from the noise of the video game machines or the noise of large obnoxious crowds or everybody running to this room or the other room. And so they really want a kind of more classical moviegoing experience where you go to the ticket booth, you buy your ticket, you walk into the lobby and there's there auditorium, as opposed to parking in a massive parking lot, walking through a gigantic lobby where there's 15 movies playing, a big crowd. ...

Really what's sort of new is they're playing to this sort of upscale, adult, sophisticated product. In that model when you now cultivated an audience that is over the age of 35 and they are either retired or upwardly mobile, usually pretty well-educated, etc., you know have a demographic that is willing to support the arts. Although it may not seem germane to everybody else ... film is an art. And of course it's an art that many people hold dear. So, it becomes a way to in a small town to kind of caretake the culture of that town and that culture can sometimes be pumped in from New York or Los Angeles. There begins the idea of the subscription model, of buying memberships, buying seats, of saying, I'm going to donate this, that, and the other thing, to keep the movie going. Then you can get into saying, look, we're not just gonna show independent films, we're also gonna show - we're gonna have the local film festival, as Northampton did. Which is again a kind of promotion of local culture, local filmmaking.

And then on top of that, you can take those kind of local efforts that you're making to promote an arts culture in your town that's very much attractive to state and local arts councils, funding agencies and corporate and other foundations who are willing to support arts and willing to support the distribution and exhibition of foreign and artistic films and you can also say we're gonna have it as a stage; you can use it for high school and other community - so all the sudden it becomes a community center.

Do you see a lot of multiplexes co-opting some of the things a lot of independent theatres do - my frame of reference is the Little Theatre, which has a cafe and it has an upscale deli and it has live jazz - do you foresee the multiplexes some of those characteristics?

That's already happened. And where you see that most is, sorry to say, is in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is really a - I know it sounds pretentious, because I live here - but it is really at the pinnacle or the forefront of moviegoing in terms of changes in film exhibition. A number of theatres have restaurants, have wine bars; we have a number of theaters here with bookstores. And they're really trying to create that same kind of experience. We have a new theatre that the Landmark - the Landmark circuit has built their flagship theatre here. And it actually has three living rooms, what they call living rooms, which is basically kind of a take-off on what - there's another kind of moviegoing culture around the country which is sort-of like ... which is where there's a lot of either tables or couches and you watch movies like that. These are three small auditoriums where there are no theatre seats; they're all love seats and sofas.

And those are national-level chains -

This is Landmark Theatres which is the largest art house circuit in the country. So their newest theatres have three of these living rooms built into them. And they're exceedlingly popular, as you can imagine. So, for instance, I saw Atonement there. So you can imagine, if you're gonna go to watch a romantic movie, it's not bad to go do it in a nice, comfy, leather loveseat. So those are the kinds of experiences you can have now. The circuits are definitely doing that. Circuits are putting in 21-plus screenings, where you have alcohol. Circuits are putting in VIP seating, reserve ticketing, valet parking; ushers are coming back to some of these theatres, so there are people who actually take you to your seat. [Someone will] actually speak before the movie comes out ...

That's also on [another theatre circuit], another big brand, which is part of the Civic Theatre company, which also tries to do that. They really have created a kind of cinephile culture as well with some of these same initiatives, where they have the restaurants, the bookstore, they have lots programming ... they have a lot of special classical treatment, a lot of special classical films, independent film, a lot of film festivals. So they're trying to do within one multiplex - they're trying to do essentially what a whole area might do in Western Massachusetts where they'll have a local film festival ... they'll have classic film, they'll have directors series where they'll bring in a director to talk about their film. It's a lot of programming like that.

Bill PetersThe Pleasant Street Theater, under construction.

The programming part is very Los Angeles and New York, but there are innovations in terms of the changes in film exhibition are definitely being inspired by some of the things people have really come to love in these more independent [theatres], like the sitting on couches vs. seats, the multitude of programming, the much more upscale - that's the big change too, is concession. You talk about coffee. That's a big change too, in that increasingly you're finding the implementation of high-end chocolate, high-end pizza brought in by special restaurants, coffees being served - espresso, cappuccino. That's especially prevalent in art houses and the circuits that run them. So it's not something in just single-screen independent theatres, you find that'll happen in the national circuit.

The main multiplex circuits like the Cinemarks, the AMCs, the Regals, they have expanded their concession items somewhat. You can increasingly actually have a meal at these places. But they're not necessarily bringing in this 21-plus screening where there's full-level [amenities] for adults.

But I think that is, again, the same thing that I talked about with what's happened with those art-house theatres that are independent - they're trying to create this older, more sophisticated audience; they can kind of rely on that kind of thing. Well gradually, you're seeing this the art-house circuits as well. They rely on that to dictate programs for them. ... The programming has to affect your audience and your audience has to come to understand your brand. Because they're the brand to all these theatres. And when you think about the Amherst Cinema, you think about the Academy of Music, and Pleasant Street, those theatres had a definable brand. If you said, 'Oh I'm gonna go see something at the Pleasant Street Theater,' you would not think that it was going to be, you know, Jaws. So they have to program accordingly for that audience.

With all of that happening - with the evolution of a lot of these chain theatres - do you think that a lot of independent filmmaking will begin to forego the theatre altogether and just go straight to DVD; will that all that go become decentralized? Or is the theatre still the primary -

This is the million-dollar question. What's happening with this closing window between theatrical release and of course it's happening amidst the fact that everybody owns a [video] camera and can put their movies online without having to wait for somebody to buy the film and then try to get the film distributed to theatres. Every ten years, somebody says that movie theatres are going away. Or, in the 1920s, it was radio; in the 1930s, it was the Depression; in the 1950s it was TV; in the 1970s and 80s it was home video; now it's the Internet. It's like a parlor game. It's sort of a knee-jerk reaction - Uh oh, new technology, that's it.

But that generally works as part of the idea of the replacement theory of technology and entertainment. But let's just presuppose that if TV replaced radio, why do we still radio? Or why does one still have CD players and VCRs if we have the Internet? The idea is that we tend to kind of amalgamate technology and keep all these things around as multiplicity of options - in terms of how to enjoy our film, TV, our videos.

You know, in this case, I don't see movie theatres going anywhere they haven't gone before. Now they have an increasing challenge, and the biggest challenge they actually have, is not from the Internet, it's from home theatres. In that now if you've got nice big house, a nice big room, you can get yourself a really nice HD projector, buy yourself a screen. You can get movie theatre seats literally brought to your home and you can build a home theatre that will replicate something akin to a very small movie house. And when you have a pristine image of something on Blu-ray or HD DVD popping up on the screen, you're getting it a few months after it's in the movies. And you start to say: 'Gee, why should I go to the movie theatre?'

But people go to the movie theatres for essentially the same reason they've always gone. First of all, as long as the they keep the theatrical window the same, and they're not gonna start releasing things the same day on video and theatres, which some people do, as you know, but it's a complicated point. But people go to the movies because they want to be in a communal setting. They want to see the movie on opening weekend. They want to be in a crowd.

Because again, they kind of understand that there's a kind of visceral experience they have because they're sitting with other people. They're shrieking at the horror movies, they're laughing at a comedy, they're crying at a tearjerker. They're feeding off of that energy. And you can't get that energy at home with three other people or by yourself. You can get a different kind of energy - maybe you can talk to the screen without worrying about somebody sh-shing you. You'll be able to sit and make comments, and maybe you'll even be more romantic if it's just the two of you watching some film. But it's never going to be the experience you have at the movie theatre. And that essentially has been the reason that movie houses are still around today.

Because movies on some kind of box in your home - you know, go back to the 1930s and 1940s, and even though people began to watch movies on that in the 1950s, ... And the fact of the matter is most people still want to see a movie on a big screen. The reason for that is if I say, 'Let's go watch I Am Legend on an iPhone' and 'Let's go watch I Am Legend in the movie theatre,' it's the same movie, potentially - although you could theoretically say it's not - but it's a vastly different experience.

And I think that's the reason right now, anyway, and I think also movie theatres are responding to changes so they're bringing in - there's more and more movies coming out in 3D, there's a whole changeover from 35mm to digital projection. There probably will be more and more high-definition concerts. There's a group called Fathom which is doing high-definition broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and broadcasting them to theatres across the country. So there's more and more programming to try and figure out how to make these venues increasingly useful, profitable. ... So, you know, I'm not too worried, to be honest with you.

Box office sales were up last year, and I think the MPA had a study that said that people who even have home technologies still will see more movies [in the theatre] than people who don't.

Exactly.

I did want to ask about clearance, and the battle over distribution rights. I was reading an interview with Tom Kiefaber, and he once said, awhile ago, that, decades ago, that clearance was a good thing for the customer because you had mostly single screens at that time and it guaranteed variety. How has clearance as a policy evolved over the last several decades?

I think what you could say is that the zones are getting smaller. So, for instance, where I live, in Los Angeles. Initially, there would be one movie playing within like a five mile radius. That would be it. And in Manhattan, it was the same thing. If you went to see a movie on 42nd Street, you couldn't go see that same movie for another thirty blocks. But now, you can find a movie - I've seen movies where the movie's playing on 42nd Street and playing at 34th Street. So, at that point, you have a very, very, very small zone, and often, in cases, there's only one theatre in that zone.

So what happens is that one theatre begins cannibalizing the other. And the problem there is that, let's say, for instance, where I live in Los Angeles, we have a whole group of historic theatres in Westwood Village. Now, traditionally, anything playing in Westwood Village would not also be playing just down the street unless it was something like 4 miles at Century City, which is right nearby. Now, there's a brand new AMC multiplex playing the same movies that are playing at those historic single-screen theatres in Westwood Village. Well, you can imagine what's happened, right, when the brand-new multiplex gets their brand-new redesigned mall, there's a great new food court. And then you've got Westwood which has parking problems, the theatres are a bit older, they've got some amazing theatres. But you know what? People don't go there. Because Westwood itself has declined.

So in the old days, you'd say, 'Gee, it's only playing all the way in Santa Monica, or here in Westwood [...] I guess I'll have to got to Westwood, I don't want to travel to Santa Monica.' But now, even the showing of the same movie that's within a very small distance, and one has ample parking, and one you have to drive around and worry about lots and all that. People live - and it's sad - in an age of relative convenience. They're gonna go to the place where they know they can get parking, they don't have to worry about it, they wanna do shopping. So in the old days, the clearance would've kept it whole, it would've made sure that only [a certain movie] would've been playing in one of these theatres here. So that's been a problem, in that it doesn't preserve the sort of unique selling point of a theatre for that reason.

There are theatres that - a perfect example of a crazy zone is in Ontario, California, about a half-hour east of downtown Los Angeles. There are theatres with roughly 60 screens across the street from each other. I don't know how many screens you can fill with people, and there it's fine. But if there's an older, five-screen theatre down the road, well, they're probably going to be in the same zone. Because these 60 screens, these theatres, have all these movies, you can imagine if you had an independent theatre. And what would you get? If you have to fill 25-30 screens in one weekend, they can play your movie on 6 screens. And if you have an older single-screen theatre with 250-500 seats, and you have one show time every three hours, when [the larger theatres] have one show time every half an hour with 2-300 seats. So you can see very easily why distributors like multiplexes and even why patrons like multiplexes. They're gonna sort-of pop in and there'll be something. So that is a change.